


The Governess and the Sea

by The Governess (Beatrice_Sank)



Series: Last of the Inked [6]
Category: All the Wrong Questions - Lemony Snicket, Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: (LOADS of it), (it's not pretty), (kind of), And the lack of, Attempts at atmosphere, Bluebirds used as messengers, Ecology, Ellington is scared of nature, F/F, Fragmentary Plot, Frenemies, I'm terrible at dialogues, Inhumane Society, Last of the inked, Missing Scene, Sides, So they end up being bloody irritating philosophers, Stain'd-by-the-Sea 15 years after ATWQ, The Beast(s), The natural and the unnatural, We Have a Good Plan, Were we not short of -say- a meteorologist, a little shippy around the eyes, architecture, elaborate headcanon, wonder why, world building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-09
Updated: 2017-01-09
Packaged: 2018-09-16 00:23:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9265595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatrice_Sank/pseuds/The%20Governess
Summary: A missing fragment of an intricate plot. A shard in the eye of good and evil. Is moral relativism relative? Are we stranded at large between the devil and the deep blue sea?Of how M. came to meet Ellington Feint, in one decayed Stain'd-by-the-Sea.There was a girl, and there was a town, and there was a woman. There were footsteps on the beach, and unforgiving wind on the cliff. There were wanderers who wondered where all the birds had gone, and why all the world was red. There were broken, enigmatic hearts and shaken ones.This is an eerie encounter, this is a hopeless quest. But what does it matter, as long as we passed the gates singing?





	1. Prelude

**Author's Note:**

> Set between letters 9 and 10 of the M.'s letters. The Letters make a lot more sense after you read this, but to understand it, you should read the Letters first (as I said, a fragmentary plot). 
> 
> After a violent encounter between Ellington and V., she is in possession of his fragment of the statue. Ellington has become a figure of legend in VFD's tales, and M. comes to see for herself. Lemony's ghost is never far (especially since he's not really dead). 
> 
> If you wish to understand why Stain'd had become what it is in this story, you should read A Tale of Two Towns, another part of my Last of the Inked series.

There was a town, and there was a girl, and there was a statue. And this is all there was. Who are we, in truth, to say if someone or something is right or wrong, had been or will be, why, where and how, when we ourselves only just set foot on a path that had been trodden before, so many times, by other feet, those of people belonging to what is supposed to be another story entirely. There are no such things as separated storylines, as there are no such things as narrative mistakes. If one is wrong, one has to admit it is always, in the end, in the face of morality.

  
There was a woman, too. As every woman, she once was a girl, a word which here means “of an age prone to wrong choices, when led in the wrong direction by the wrong kind of adults, for the wrong reasons and through the wrong treason”. Did she fell, was she pushed? It is said never to answer the questions strangers ask.


	2. It deepens like a coastal shelf

The woman blinked, as if something sulfurous had stuck in her eyes. The girl stopped in front of her at a ten feet distance, looking blatantly insecure, and blinked, too. In fact, she blinked a total of 73 times in the next minute, signaling in Morse code the following message:  
I dare not approach, given what happened last time. Stop. I wish to know what your dispositions are, and if you still are in possession of the item you seized then. Stop. I mean no harm. Stop. We are different from those who came last time. Stop. You don't have to trust me, but I think you should at least hear me. Stop. They say so many things about you. Stop. But I wanted to see for myself. Stop. So… what do you say?  
   
The woman blinked again. Once. It meant:  
Why did you insist on meeting at the beach? We could as easily have walked on the heights, where it is even quieter. Here, there are weeds. But as for law, there is none. In fact, if you are so scared, why did you insist on meeting at all? Why?  
   
That last question was conveyed through a mere frown of an eyebrow. In truth, the woman never needed anything else to ask questions with her eyes.  
   
The girl took a step forwards, and took off her beret, only to begin crushing it with nervous fingers. Since she was there, and since the woman had yet to make a move that would suggest it was her final intention to attack her, she might as well speak her mind. There was a hard ball of anger in her chest when she arrived, but the long walk through this eerie landscape and the general appearance of her interlocutor had weakened her spirits to the point that she now felt oddly crushed by everything that surrounded her. For a reason she couldn't quite pinpoint, something in the wind, or in the vacuum left by the departed water conjured up the darkest of her concerns; not only the immediate worries that had led her there, but the sedimented, deep questions she knew she shouldn't ask. She was blinking furiously now. It wasn't Morse code anymore, but for now it didn't matter. It signaled the following:  
Because I know that at some point, we will grow up.  
   
The woman had a dark laugh. She shook her bob of black hair and grabbed her bag, turning around to follow a non-existent path along the beach.  
   
“Come.”  
They walked together silently, at a respectable distance, each of them avoiding to look directly at the other. Their silhouettes appeared tensed even in the distance, and it was clear that they both anticipated some kind of aggression, especially the girl, whose eyes were scanning her surroundings as if expecting to meet a whole pack of accomplices dissimulated behind the occasional boulder. After some time, however, probably when this attitude became too hard to  
sustain, shoulders lowered gradually and fists bloomed into fingers that held nothing but the oldfashioned accessories that punctuated their peculiar, albeit very different in style, attire. Almost imperceptibly, the woman began to hum something that was not so much a tune than subtle variations on a single note, and, while such an attitude would have grated on the girl's nerves under any other circumstances, she found that it actually soothed her, providing her with a sense of companionship. She was beginning to chastise herself for being lulled into a false sense of security when the woman did something that so obviously negated the intentions that she was being ascribed that any incentive to cautiousness became preposterous.  
The girl eyed her in petrified awe as she took a cigarette out of her bag and rummaged through a green box of matches before lighting it and throwing the smoking remains carelessly to the ground. She all but ran to crush it under her shoe. Without looking back, the woman said:  
“The sand is damp enough, you know. As if it just rained.”  
   
She knew the girl's eyes were probably signaling frantically to her back, but she didn't give a damn. At least they had not lied about having good intentions. It didn't mean anything of course. They almost always had.  
   
Weeds were, as announced, crawling everywhere. As they resumed their walk, the girl couldn't help but notice the woman seemed to crush them on purpose, with her heavy leather boots. The hand that was holding the cigarette was gloved in the same thick material, and she thought that something in her clothing was rendering a metallic glow, although the fabric did evoke regular leather. Minutes passed and, maybe sensing that, after treading side by side with a complete, and potentially dangerous stranger, one ought to say something to make conversation, she turned to the girl:  
   
“Have you read the book that asks where the ducks go in winter, when it freezes?”  
   
To any other person, the question may have sounded odd, but the girl had had an unusual education, and she was used to that kind of things:  
   
“The rude one, by the man who swore never to come out of his house again?”  
   
“Yes. I wouldn't say rude. This whole business about the ducks is pure rubbish anyway. It is a tale. The birds don't go anywhere. When it freezes, they get stuck in the ice, just as anybody. That's what happened here.”  
   
She gestured vaguely toward the sea of weeds.  
   
“The birds are all gone now.”  
   
She seemed to realize her voice had dropped somehow, and added:  
   
“Metaphorically, of course. I meant they all died.”  
   
“I had gathered as much.”  
   
Silence fell again after such a sample of hermeneutics, but, as if this particular allusion had established the general theme, you could almost hear thoughts discretely gliding along a small portion of the uneven ground. Memories were gathered from distant, dusty corners, and the girl looked almost embarrassed.  
   
“Surely you must be aware of the fact that the story of what happened here isn't completely unknown.”  
   
The woman said nothing at first. Like she was trying her own patience. Though laced with irony, her voice had some of the accents of ancient repression.  
   
“Isn't it, now? How very educational to the masses. Is that why you're here, are we part of your cursus honorum yet? I'm sure about the story, but I doubt you know anything of the truth.”  
   
After eying the girl, she added:  
   
“Ah but of course, you don't believe in truth as a concept, do you?”  
   
In the girl's experience, there wasn't much you could answer to such an obvious allegation, but was it her fault if people chose to reason upon false premises.  
   
“It has proved treacherous in the past.”  
   
“How surprising. But you see, I have had a great deal of quality time to think about it, and the more I do, the more I am convinced that it is a luxury reserved for the privileged. When something  
definite happens to you, you cannot go on refuting the validity of truth. It just imposes on you, crushes you methodically.”  
   
The girl stayed silent for a while. She looked at the woman picking random patches of weeds, red and dark red, black and brown, with brisk, small gestures, using the tip of her gloves. She was not holding them. Merely pushing them away, in a neat little pile. Slowly, a circle of clean sand appeared and enlarged around them.  
   
The beach was very blue now, the good kind of blue, as when it's night in those old movies your parents like and always insist you should watch instead of paying attention to crickets. There was something rhythmic in this frantic gathering, a sort of call for music. But she was probably imagining things. This is why she said:  
   
“Truth is… I would very much like to hear it from you. They say a lot of things.”  
   
The woman stopped for a second and turned her back to her.  
   
“Oh, yes, they do. This god-forsaken town is probably the only place where the rumor of the world ever shuts up. Perhaps that's why it seems impossible for me to go away for good, however hard I try. I fear it may be out of petrification, though.”  
   
She raised her head. Far away above them, on the edge of the cliff, a small yellow square cut up a window on the uniform coat of night. It was high, but you could, if you screwed up your eyes, catch sight of a strangely round head passing by. Some people just never get when it's time for a change of style.  
The head stood there for a minute and then disappeared. The woman sighed.  
   
“I don't know what you've heard, but I am spectacularly good at guessing. It happens so soon, becoming part of a story. It's been a while, and we don't have much to tell now. I'm sure I don't, at least. My youth was too eventful, I have exhausted all the possibilities. I know quite a lot about having a destiny, and that is the biggest crime that was ever committed against me, saying it from a distance. One minute you're a person, and the next, you are everyone's way to pass the time.”  
   
She pressed her boot on the pile she had made to compress more weeds. The algae exuded a pale red juice with a pathetic whine. The woman gave it the most despising look the girl had seen in a long time. It reminded her of her Intricate Games and Complex Sports instructor on a bad day.  
   
“Anyway, you should forget everything about it. I won't be your Scheherazade. I'm done being a freak show.”  
   
“And in spite of everything, here you are, and there I am. I do not hope for the truth, but for, maybe, something of a shard. I mean no harm.”  
   
Black eyebrows accentuated the spark of green eyes. As far as shards were concerned, she knew where she stood, but really the ingenuity currently displayed was almost disarming.  
   
“You really think I would trust you over your own story? Did you plan on selling me some kind of romantic version of the girl in her beret, last to be marked, with her gardening companion? I did my research. And then what? “There was a girl, and there was a town, and there was a terrible woman with a dark, dark past?” No. Enough. I have had enough.”  
   
The girl hesitated. There was a lot of things she could have said, like “Sometimes, you cannot help it, life really is romantic, not in a good way though”, or “What will you ever trust, if you don't trust a good story?”, or even “Isn't it a bit hot to wear gloves?”. But she didn't. She knew better, for a good part, than to tell the woman everything, and then there was the fact that she really liked her beret and was therefore a bit irked. She sat in the wet sand, circling her knees with her arms. Time passed.  
   
“Maybe you're right, it is unfair to call it rude”, she finally said as if it solved everything. She looked up.  
   
“You're the one who insists on being the villain, though.”  
   
The woman said nothing. It looked very much like there was nothing that could be said, but she may have signaled something, against her will. The girl tightened her hold on her knees.  
   
“While there are so many who would qualify.”  
   
The woman raised her head briskly.  
   
“I don't really believe in evil. You have your philosophical joker with truth, so I guess it would be modern of me to have one, too.”  
   
“...you don't?” said the girl in a small voice.  
   
“No. I do believe, however, in people being generous and, what is the word, ah, chivalrous.” She sounded so venomous the girl crawled slightly back. There were moments when her smile seemed definite enough, and those moment were truly terrifying.  
   
“Of course, she went on, this is not given to everybody. There are those who manage. And then, there are those who are reasonable. This is a terrible thing of its own, being reasonable. No one can kill a system. You may fall into a pit of darkness without ever being distinctively wrong, not once. Look around you, look. Nothing happened here, really. Nothing at all. We just went on.”  
   
The woman looked up the hills, towards the red light, the constant red light that emanated from countless blocks of squared buildings, barracks and storehouses, that winded to make the town look like a giant snail.  
   
“I don't know if anyone could have seen it coming, but C., the one who – not that you would understand … They tried to rally her, well, of course they tried. Offered her some advantages, knowledge, money. To prevent her from selling to the other side. They came one day, with their eagles. There are many things you could say about C., but she was never scared. Of anything, really. She just sent them away, telling them she would sell to anyone who asked, and that she could always decide to stop selling to them if they pushed it too much. She said she didn't want to take side, for she deemed it impossible to tell which of them was the right one. I can't say she was wrong. That's something your lot always had trouble understanding. You have no fancy names for us. The in-betweeners. The rest of the world.”  
   
She paused.  
   
“Yes. How do you call us then? That anonymous part, between the devil and the deep blue sea? We never had anything fitting.”  
   
The girl spoke as someone who had tried to stay silent and failed, in a low voice that indicated the result of a struggle:  
   
“Come. I don't think you qualify very well as the quiet, anonymous mass. Not the girl with a look that could mean anything. Neither of you, in fact, from what I have heard. Not the woman in the red tower. None of you were scared, none. You think you've escaped it, that you are not part of it, but we all are. There is no name because there is no in-between. We all are forever engaged with it, struggling with it. It just eats you up. You replayed it here, as it is replayed everywhere. This has nothing to do with eyes on your ankle, but nobody gets it. I am confused about a lot of things,  
but not about that. Believe me, I tried to escape, too. This is a meddle, and you have to live through it, or else you don't live at all.”  
   
The woman gave her a look that had a pointed meaning, so much that she felt her flesh crawl. It was painfully obvious how fragile the mask of coldness was, but the girl was a foreigner. She came from the past, and had no idea that some topics had ceased to exist a long time ago.  
   
“You think I escaped it?”  
   
The girl remained silent.  
   
“You really are too young. You shouldn't talk like that, not to the likes of me. Who knows what we could do. After all, I sent your partner to the ground, didn't I? Or so I have heard.”  
   
The girl was looking at her shoes again, as if to check she was not on the verge of some surprise dark well.  
   
“Did he fall?”  
   
“Would I tell you, if I had pushed him? He is a clumsy one. But you don't have to be very bright to be dangerous, in my experience. Whatever I did or not, I think I had reasons enough to worry. I don't know you. I don't know anyone anymore.”  
   
“He came to you unarmed! He is not one of them, and you knew it!”  
   
“So he kept saying. But please, to think he was unarmed… Of course he was armed. There may be some people who take you for a pair of sweet children, I don't know, your parents maybe? Oh. Personally, all I cared about was that he had something that belonged to me.”  
   
The girl seemed taken aback, but it may as well have been an act. She was trying to appear calm, but the allegation on her companion's weapons had clearly unsettled her position. What kind, she couldn't help but wonder. Which one?  
   
“Do you realize that, if you feel it belongs to you, it means you belong to them? This is one of their biggest, and I must say sole idea.”  
  
   
“Please, I don't belong to anyone, you know. I am my own person. No one has me on a leash, and tells me what is supposed to be right or wrong. I do not have to hide my tattoo number. You are extraordinary, the whole of you. Always convinced that everyone only dreams of joining your little secret after school club, with all your codes and disguises and passwords. You are just a bunch of Junior Detectives. Greatly amusing, but at some point you will have to realize you've chosen the wrong narrative conventions.”  
   
Strangely, her anger died off as soon as it had risen, and she sat down unceremoniously on the wet sand, as if someone had cut the string that was keeping her going. She looked intensely at the flattened pile of weeds that still stood at her feet , and stroke another match. The plants quickly took fire, producing an eerie red smoke. The smell of sulfur quietly rose. While this spectacle had the girl instantaneously tens ing , the woman obviously relaxed, taking a real pleasure in watching the flames grow higher. The girl took her distance from the salty fire-camp, slightly shaking.  
   
“Did you pushed him? He must have told you you were in danger. Others will want to find you, and they won't be as innocuous as we are.”  
   
The woman took another cigarette, lighted it to the fire, and puffed on it contentedly.  
   
“That is a rather obscure story only him and I could tell, and his memories will probably have blurred a tad. Would it help to know my version, given that you will not believe me anyway? Oh, probably. But I don't have to humor you.”  
   
She breathed deeply.  
   
“I don't think he would, either.”  
   
Letting that sink in, she blew an elegant ring across the fumes; when passing threw it, it became almost green, before dissolving into the air.  
   
“As for that other matter, have you considered the possibility that they already did?”  
   
She watched with satisfaction the girl gasped for air.  
   
“I mean, the fact that I do dwell here might seem awfully predictable, but I am a slippery one. I am found when I want to be.”  
   
“Did you, though?”  
   
The girl's tone was now accusatory, but you could say from the cryptic syntax that she could not quite believe what was currently implied.  
   
“Did I what?”  
   
“Give them the statue.”  
   
The woman exhaled again and disappeared for a second behind the warm mist.  
   
“Why do you always assume they are after the same thing than you are? Maybe they wanted something else, this time.”  
   
“And what would that be?”  
   
“Well, me. As you may have heard, I have – she spat the word as if taken from another mouth – multiple talents.”  
   
She let out a mirthless chuckle.  
   
“You, on the other hand, have no interest in recruiting me, have you? I can't picture you offering, you would feel so foolish.”  
   
Seeing that the girl had nothing to add, she continued:  
   
“See, that is why they always are one step ahead: they are far less exclusive than you are. You should stop acting as if your hearts were so pure one could dine on it.”  
   
Irritation was beginning to rise inside that little head, she could tell, from the way the beret kept turning and turning between her hands.  
“Stop. Stop it. There is no “you”. I'm not… I am barely part of it. We're almost alone here. And I almost quit. Me, my associate. There is only so much you can take from your own family, it would seem.”  
   
She paused, and somehow, everything paused with her. Until the woman whispered:  
   
“Is that so?”  
   
The fire flickered. She poked at it with jealous care, and the flames grew higher. It only served to anguish the girl a bit more.  
   
“I don't give a damned about all that. I only know there is a job to be done here, and I intend to do it, or else the world is going to fall apart at the hands of those who do have an agenda to meet. So don't. Just...don't.”  
   
The smoke was beginning to get at her, she could almost taste it now.  
   
“Barely, almost… this is not how it works, truly, and you know it. Let me tell you something, for you seem a bit lost to me. There are, in fact, two sides, you see: those who think there are, indeed, such a thing as sides, and those who don't. Hence the overlapping.”  
   
The girl was furious now. Furious at herself, for coming to this lawless, god-forsaken place. Furious at the town, for being so locked, so distant, so peculiar in its own kind of abandonment. Furious at the woman, who kept stocking the fire, and the smoke, it was… the fumes were growing more and more acrid. She felt her eyes watering and blinked ferociously.  
   
“Why would you even do that?” she cried in frustration, and then coughed.  
   
The woman didn't even have to raise her head this time. She smiled a bitter smile:  
   
“The Queen, she likes it red.”  
   
The girl produced a handkerchief from the unsuspected depths of her hat.  
   
“This is probably unhealthy.”  
   
“Oh no. Don't you worry. They are working on reducing sulfuric levels, so… everything should be fine.”  
   
“This town is hellish”, muttered the girl.  
   
The woman sighed contentedly.  
   
“Yes, no place like home.”  
   
Nonetheless, she withdrew some of the fuel, so the fire would extinguish by itself.  
   
“Your friend, the gardener, she added abruptly, he's staying at the Colophon Clinic, isn't he?”  
   
Not a muscle moved in the girl's face. You could see she had been good at her Virtuous Facial Disguise class.  
“We had him transferred, of course.”  
   
“Don't worry, I will leave him alone. And I would never go and bother O. Not her. They never took her into account anyway. I wouldn't have either, to be honest. Ultimately, we are not very recommendable people.”  
   
To the girl, it could have been a rather laughable statement, but she pronounced it as if it were some kind of final judgment to be applied in the time to come, and she said nothing to it.  
   
“I am just curious, you know. We chatted for a little while, and he sure was an interesting fellow. You seem more reasonable, if more...conflicted.”  
   
Maybe it was true, for the girl's face offered quite a show of indecision at that moment. Her  
associate was conflicted alright, in his own special sense, but she would refrain from stating it to a woman you so evidently couldn't trust she even made a fire under your nose. Something inside her flickered.  
   
“He is interesting, and that is why I'd very much like him to stay alive.”  
   
The woman laughed.  
   
“Well done, but a bit much, don't you think? You are quite the actress, but some fragments of you are just too naive to be efficiently disguised, so be at peace. I try to stay innocuous to children. When did all the true adults go, on your side, anyway? Couldn't they send someone to whom I would not have been the stuff of legends?”  
   
The girl raised an eloquent eyebrow, a reminder of the absence of monopole in mysterious facial expressions. This was, in its own right, a fairly valid question, but not one she was ready to answer. The fact that it had been asked was in itself puzzling. Beyond the beret, she was not particularly young. Neither was her associate. The woman, on the other hand, seemed rather ageless, with her bob of black hair and leather clothing. Despite all that, it was pretty clear for both of them that she was a woman and that the other was just a girl.  
   
“Define adult?” she asked, because really, what could she do.  
   
The woman looked at her and sighed.  
   
“Sadly enough, in our branch of activity, misery cannot be a factor, neither can misanthropy nor cynicism. So I would say it has to do with the irretrievable. The day you realize you cannot go back and try again. Being an adult is being too late. But I guess it just comes up if you feel old already.”  
   
The girl looked up to the woman who had risen again to crush the last remnants of the fire.  
   
“I used to think that one day, I would be sure, and that would mean I had become an adult.”  
   
“That would more accurately mean you've become a villain. But it isn't that bad. It happens to the best. Society hates people who are too sure of themselves, when their convictions are a bit too personal. You don't seem very prone to that fault, anyway.”  
The girl wasn't listening to her anymore. It was one thing to review visions of good and evil between enemies, or rather, strangers. But the question still hung in the progressively clearing atmosphere. She didn't know. It meant she had not realized. How strange, you would think that she would be the first to predict and observe. But she probably was too talented a woman, at the end of the day, and she had hidden for so long. So really, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that she was the one to ask where all the birds had gone. She was not going to be the one to give her that precise answer.  
Instead she rose without a word and began walking straight ahead, following the cliff lining up the deserted beach. It was a strange thing, walking under water in the open like this.  
You still felt the pressure, though.  
   
They progressed in silence for a long moment. Dark settled definitively. The profile of the cliff changed, becoming more serrated, and something darker appeared on the horizon, a massive block of blackness over the uncertainty of the night. Then the girl felt herself pushed no too gently against the chalky surface. Just when she expected impact, she was surprised to find herself gliding into a discrete crevasse leading to what appeared to be a small grotto. Sea had come and gone and dug that cave long ago, as far as she could judge from the irregularities of walls that were so white they conserved a radiance in the dark. That impression alone should have apprised her, but it was only much later, while rebuilding the scene in her mind, that she understood it probably was the ray of the lighthouse reflecting on wet sand and through the gap that artificially created an impression of enchantment. The woman was pressed against her, but she promptly backed off and whispered:  
   
“Excuse my boldness, it's just that the time isn't quite right, and I forgot.”  
   
The girl looked, through the crevasse, as the black mass lighted up progressively. You could perceive some agitation and suddenly, a bell rang. The sound was deep and warm, the product of a large, old bell, a brown sound, rather serene, unlike the shrill, meager ring that usually sent her mind buzzing. Nevertheless, it echoed with something else, something buried a few layers deeper into her mind. A memory was vibrating, and it sounded like home. The woman probably misinterpreted the look on her face, for she supplied:  
   
“They keep ringing the damned thing every eight hours. If I'm honest, I should have destroyed it long ago, but people are always crawling around as if it were some goddam treasure. They don't seem to mind. But I don't like cattle.”  
   
The alert was short-lived. Not three minutes later, the lights disappeared from the fortress, and the noises receded. Avoiding touching her, the woman waved her to come out. They resumed their walk and fell in a distracted silence again, and as they progressed, the girl realized the black block wasn't a monument, but an island, and abandoned piece of rock in the middle of the absent sea. It was bigger and further than she had originally thought, by a sort of watery mirage. And as they went, the pulling sensation grew stronger and stronger, until she asked:  
  
   
“Is that… a school?”  
   
The woman side-glanced at her and smirked like someone who had her suspicions all along.  
   
“You see, you remember more than what you claimed to.”  
   
The answer made no sense whatsoever to the girl, and she had to insist:  
“No, it's not that… It reminds me of a place I know...”  
   
They had that old bell, but it was used in an unusual way, as was everything else at that time. The bell delivered no code, it didn't ring the end of class. It opened and closed a special time, a sort of parenthesis, a small ball of silence crumpled inside the quietness of the world. It was something even more saint than the school itself, maybe even more than the library. It rang at random, when someone (she had come to understand it often was the same someone, when he was stuck by melancholy or yet another moral crisis) decided it was time for meditation. So they thought. It rang and they thought, for a couple of minutes, one hour sometimes, or even, on a memorable day, for a whole June afternoon, when it was so sunny and lovely outside that the person responsible for the ringing had just forgotten all about it and run to the orchard, where he promptly erased his melancholic state with the help of some stolen apples and, as it appeared, pleasant company along with a few bats. She had to admit she discovered things about herself and about her companions that day. To begin with, at which point they would abandon their serious posture, throw their arms to the sky in despair and run away screaming like mad that it was way too quiet. She also thought about a few things, of course. Like how many centimeters she was going to grow in the months to come, and how that would bring her closer to that interesting range of vials in the Vaporous and Fatal Department. Or how to upgrade her favorite cookie recipe with chopped nuts. Or the drawbacks of a moral scale based purely on intentions as opposed to one based on actions. Or how their quiet time shouldn't depend so much on their instructors' complicated love life, as did the rest of the curriculum. To be sure, they should probably ban any kind of romantic relationship in the hierarchy of the organization. But none of the adults demonstrated any kind of sense over the subject. True, it would be difficult to set it up, given that most of the oldest members were married and that their children were either taught to there or taught themselves, and that would not do to break any more families, but the young adults should at least behave. They weren't even married, for Lowry's sake! She held very definitive ideas about marriage at that time. Still did, in a different way. History (or time? What was the difference?) had proved that their instructors (instructors! To think about it now, it was preposterous, to say the least. They had seemed so far, they were so young, younger than she was now. She often reflected that books had given them a completely messed-up vision of what children were supposed and able to do by themselves at a given age. The submarine, for crying out loud. Books were dangerous and such a force of liberation they could spin the world out of its axis by reminding people they could do what they bloody wanted. To say it all: she was conflicted about narrative structures.), their instuctors did too, to a point of absurdity. She had to blame that sassy, hateful British writer and her opening lines on this one. The need for marriage had caused a good proportion of the tragedies that had plagued the structure, in its various… ramifications. She hoped they had definite ideas about funerals, too. The worst part was, she bet they did. The most notorious catastrophe the  
organization had endured came during the burial of one of its oldest member. “The last act is bloody, you throw some dirt over the head and you are done forever”, or something like that, according to that other hateful, French mystic. It has been chaos. She was ten. That extra centimeters proved useful. They had to leave the school in a great hurry. That is often the case when a building is halfway consumed by fire. When the flames reached the pharmacy, explosions grew interesting colors. It never reached the library, though. Sometimes, “halfway” is an excellent word, as many undesirable people were inclined to say. The orchard, however… Hadn't it been for the winds, it might have been a close call. It was fascinating, how things in their lives never were close calls, except for, obviously, their lives. But there was always the wind. A gush had come suddenly, at the worst possible moment, because. The trees had danced like string you twist, while thinning like paper. It was late September. Her things had smelt of apple cobbler for months. Nevertheless, there are worse scents. There are far worse scents.  
   
   
A breeze swept over her face and she jumped a bit, briefly panicked, before she realized they had passed the massive cover of the islands and were turning along the cliff. The woman was eying her curiously.  
   
“Don't worry, it's only the sea air we still get from time to time. Curious phenomenon. No one pays attention anymore, apart from the happy few...”  
   
The girl wasn't paying great attention either. She was busy looking back at the black fortress, ominous and opaque.  
   
“Did you study there? What kind of school is that supposed to be?”  
   
The woman appeared to think she was completely missing the point, and shrugged.  
   
“Not exactly… This was originally meant to provide children with a top-drawer education.”  
   
“Is that so”, said the girl pensively. “What do they think is a low-drawer education?”  
   
The woman side-glanced at her ironically.  
   
“Like you wouldn't know, with the kind of education you received. They've been gone for a long time, and I never went there, I was already… otherwise engaged. Yes. And then it became the Aquarium. They always thought it was me, I suppose, but for once it really wasn't.”  
  
   
It would have been rude, probably, to point out she wasn't making any sense, so the girl refrained.  
   
“I never was a top-drawer kind of person”, the woman added as if to explain herself.  
   
“Everybody knows the secret booby-trap is never set in the top-drawer anyway”, supplied the girl helpfully. “This is a very cheap place to hide your secrets. Not unlike dress sewing, if I may.”  
   
“It remained there for how many years again? Ah but you don't know. Besides, had I wanted to hide it forever, it would have been infinitely cleverer to destroy it once and for all. But poor hiding places are a thing to cherish, little girl. So that every ten and odd years, I get to see who find it. Who looked for it. The kind of person who looked for this kind of… artifact. I get to know what they do, what they think, and above all I get to know where they live, and who they love.”  
   
Her eyes twinkled, and the girl felt vertigo taking her over.  
   
“Is there any other...”  
   
She couldn't find it in her to finish. Of course there was. She had known all along, but somehow failed to consider she might not have been unique, the only girl to walk this beach, to crouch in that empty cave, and to absurdly voice her doubts. This was an obvious pilgrimage. She turned to the woman, eyes wide.  
   
“How many...”  
   
The woman dismissed her with a vague waving.  
   
“Some remain unknown, other thought false or unrecognized, and there even are some that are considered devoid of any interest. As for the other parts, people are rarely as naive as to come and talk in the open. You are birds of a feather, the two of you.”  
She sighed and looked in the distance.  
   
“There are periods, however… For some times, people lost interest. We remained forgotten. But now…”  
  
   
“Yes. I have seen things I don't know how to prevent. This might be the only solution. But now I don't know if I want the missing parts or not.”  
   
Unexpectedly, the woman patted her beret with measured gestures.  
   
“Great. That is as good a spirit as I could hope for. You come an inch to actually deserving them, which is the most comfortable position one will ever achieve.”  
   
The girl stepped aside angrily.  
   
“You don't understand! It is happening all over again! Some are growing. I saw them.”  
   
The woman stopped dead, as if, at the thought that something, anything might be growing, she lost her sense of tease.  
   
“That is impossible.”  
   
The girl thought she saw the mask glide for a second. All traces of contained rage and acid sass, careless assurance were gone, replaced by a flicker of pure terror. The questions marks weren't asking anything anymore: they were almost straight, giving her a juvenile look, much like a child's drawing of a face.  
   
“They don't know how to. They don't have the whole thing, not even one piece!”  
   
“They figured out at some point that they didn't need the whole thing, when you can have a multitude of smaller things. You don't need to control the multitude. You just let it be. One fragment is almost harmless per se, but the whole lot… They will swarm like a blind wave.”  
   
“You don't mean...”  
   
The girl's face was blank.  
   
“Children.”  
   
She needn't say much more. The idea was so simple and so old, so old! Knowledge got lost through the years, but the idea, as always, remained. They would never grow up, but there was no need for that. The young ones were bitter enough already. It was the mass, not the individuals, you could loose some, they were easily destroyed, but one by one, for when you faced them all… It opened abysses around her.  
   
“We have to do something”, the girl kept repeating mechanically. “I thought we could control them with it, to end it all, to make them obey. Would it throw itself into a fire, or in a bottomless pit, for us, because we would be chanting to it through some mysterious ways, in a language that only belongs to that thing?”  
   
The woman had lost all colors. She was fixated on a point straight in the distance, and barely moved her lips.  
“There are many who understand the cry of the Beast, you would be surprised. When you hear it for the first time, you often discover it had been with you all along, lurking and growing. But, statue or not, it cannot be controlled.”  
   
The girl paused. She had been told otherwise, but the matter was a delicate one, if there ever was one. It was interesting that the woman should think that, very interesting. She took a breath and went on:  
   
“Lemony...”  
   
“Mr Snicket.”  
   
The woman had turned to her so swiftly she had barely seen it happening. Her face was still pale but her eyes burnt, coming out as black in the shadows of the night, strangely shinny.  
   
She was saying “Mr Snicket” in her very own way, the way some old widows speak their late husband's name, having despised him for many years and indistinctly dreamed of poisoning his morning tea, only to find themselves devastated on the day he is discovered lying flat at the bottom of the stairs. She said “Mr Snicket” as someone who would cry over a first name. She said “Mr Snicket” like a stern headmistress scolding the troublemaker she is secretly fond of, like a mother meeting, after ten years, with her estranged child. She said “Mr Snicket” like a double-agent who has been waiting for several hours at a smoky railway station, up in Maine, for an infiltrated contact she is to throw under the 1 a.m. train, and who has had time, because he is infuriatingly late, to think about it and have second thoughts, so that when he finally shows up, she fails to  
imitate those movie villains who manage to sound so definite when they meet at 1 a.m. with their infiltrated contact in a smoky railway station, up in Maine. It told many tales, the way she said it. One among many was the story of how, as the girl then realized, she hasn't been talking to her personally, at least not all the time. In their sad little interview, they had been at least three. Ghosts shouldn't count, in earnest, because who was willing to score so many times.  
   
“Yes, she bravely went on. A long time ago, he said… I don't know if I recall correctly, I was so young… but I heard something – not that I was supposed to – something… about how it responded to the statue like to a master.”  
   
She didn't say the conversation, or her distant memory of it, was about the feeling of control you got when using the instrument, like the whole world would bend according to your breath. You could destroy it all, but, what was more, you could chase evil away. Somehow, that was a bitter memory.  
   
The woman spat:  
   
“Of course he would think that. That would fit so well.”  
   
She had a muttered exclamation that was hard to interpret. It could have been a cry of anger, as well as a mark of anguish, or even an odd sob. Her dark hair fell in front of her eyes.  
   
“Why keep the statue, if you think it useless?” the girl insisted.  
   
She knew she shouldn't. The woman looked like hell. She spoke with deliberate care, detaching the syllables like members of a group once united.  
   
“Because, as I told you, it is of great interest to me to learn who wants it. I meet inspiring, wonderful people, and I make new friends. Because you are all so nice, you know. You care about your neighbors like you wouldn't say. You never treat people like tools, no, because you have a higher purpose and a good plan. You take the time to judge and decide with your free will. And, above all, you are so good when it comes to talk about problems and mysteries.  
   
The smile she gave her was positively terrifying.  
   
“So this way at least, I get to play with you from time to time.”  
  
   
This is the moment when the girl began to yell.  
   
“You don't understand any of it, don't you? You've been hiding in that dry hole for too long. Did you hear what I just said? Everyone has to suffer, now, is it? Do you think it makes you so interesting?”  
   
She kept pointing accusingly at the woman, who barely flinched. The girl was too wrapped up to notice the gesture was on the verge of the ridiculous.  
   
“Lemony...”  
   
A gloved hand caught her wrist.  
   
“Don't.”  
   
She felt like she could burst.  
   
“He said he thought it was man-made, originally. Could not have been otherwise. He said it just looked at you and...understood. What exactly, I couldn't possible say, of course he embarked into one of his usual ramblings about human darkness and guilty impulses. It just seems to embody nature, but in truth it is an educated form of it, something we have tamed to be wild. Nature itself probably wouldn't care so much. There is nothing in the world that wants to devour us as fervidly as it does. The Beast is not a beast. It's a mirror.”  
   
The woman was holding her wrist very tight. She looked incredulous, and it pained the girl a bit.  
   
“You know nothing of nature. I fear we are not reading from the same book.”  
   
She let go and, in a few long, supple strides, walked away. The girl didn't try to follow immediately. Instead, she took a couple of minutes to detail the small form that barely stood out over the global, shadowy scenery. Her movements so swift and unpredictable, with a head that, from behind, looked almost squared, encircled as it was by her strict haircut. Her leather jacket made her look sturdier than she was, heavier too, or maybe, just maybe…  
   
The girl saw a red, weak spot of light appear in mid-air, inches from the woman's face, and out of a curious instinct that had almost caused – rather ironically, for people so versed in etymology – the extinction of her family branch, she leaped forward just in time to see the match falling on the sand. The girl had received an unusual education, but an education nonetheless, and she wasn't going to let that pass without comment.  
   
“You do realize, don't you, that, while the sand may be watery, those weeds could very well catch fire?”  
   
“Oh yes. And, wouldn't you know it, the ink burns pretty well, too. They learned that… what, a good fifteen years ago.”  
For a while, they walked in a silence that more or less translated as, if she really insisted on smoking, alright, very well, let her smoke, for all the girl cared. At some point, the woman offered:  
   
“Do go on. It comforts me, knowing that someone disagrees.”  
   
The girl inhaled deeply and immediately regretted it.  
   
“If it's human-made, there can be more than one key to it. This is important. I know that you think this is your story, but what if others…”  
   
The red spot trembled.  
   
“That would be a hell of a cultural appropriation, said the woman in a hollow voice. Don't think I don't know how this ends. In that carefully improvised, double-edged plan of yours, it ends with me giving up my fragment to you, in hope that you, by some unknown and uncertain mean, manage to destroy it. You go and try, it succeeds or it fails, what does it matter really, because what matters, what really matters, is that one day you wake up in your little bed, in your own dry little hole, and you think: “The world would be such a better place, if...” It ends right there and then. Your path of truth and rightfulness, your song of innocence and immaturity. It bursts into flames, and you become just like him. All with a simple “if”, because, because. It is so very powerful a word, and if I were a villain… And then I swear to God I will come to you. I don't care if it is the last thing I ever do, at least this time I will be sure.”  
   
Unexpectedly, she found out the girl had endured this speech smiling.  
   
“All right. And then you cut my finger off and fall into the Mountain of Fate, I suppose. That  
would make a decent ending, for once.”  
   
The woman pretended to examine the bare sky, but the girl could see she was shocked.  
   
“Yeah… except for the bloody eagles.”  
   
The darkness had gradually receded, but she only noticed it at the very end. Surrounded by a feeble glow, a group of houses had appeared in a recess where the hills slopped stiffly towards the cliff.  
   
“House” is a complicated word. For one part, you could see “houses” on the hill that overlooked directly that part of the beach. It is a word that here means “fanciful, extravagant buildings, looking more like elaborated French delicacies or fragile fairy castles than family manors equipped with large libraries and highly flammable wood panels”, the latter corresponding more accurately, if one wish to be precise, to the definition of “home”. For the other part, a different kind of house could be found at the bottom of the slop. Or at least, parts of it. Planks, corrugated iron, shards of bricks, cardboard, plastic containers, copious amount of wet sand and something that looked like malevolent ivy, a red leper creeping to the barely standing walls. The effect was evocative of a child's construction set deserted out of boredom, a tower of small, colorful cubes piled up at random to create an impression of houses without the feeling that anyone could actually be living in them. Not that anyone would, as you probably wouldn't live in the house pictured in your childhood drawings, because who wants to live in a place where the sun actually smiles, or, if you have had an interesting childhood, because no one can be sure of what it looks like behind such a screen of smoke. But someone did live there, though they probably had no wish to do so. A weak light came through the gray window glass, and even if the girl was too far too see, she could feel movement inside, muffled and careful, as it always is late at night. The atmosphere was quite different, here. The beach had looked vacant, true, lawless and mysterious, profound and eerily calm, while they had walked. It had been an enigma; here it looked like a desert. Every grain of sand screamed of the bareness, the unlivability, screamed that this was not, in all certainty, a place. This was a blank space, not a point, not some ground on which you could stand without wearing away. The beach was slippery; the reality that unfolded under their eyes was anything but that. It was all too heavy.  
   
The small ensemble was surrounded by an unhealthy orange light that confirmed its status of enclave in a scenery that used either cold tones or strong reds. They were all alike, those sad little bits of house, even if each seemed to carry the weight of its own particular misery. And maybe not even that. Diffuse thankfulness and habits, without any window that could open on some ideal landscape. Technically, they were perpetually falling down, only prevented from unavoidable collapse by myriads of make-do strategies, ropes and knots, tape and glue, kickstands and abutments. And mortar. Lots of mortar. So they followed their natural course, and were stopped on the way, pushed back and then, forth it went again, back, and forth. Up on the hills, fancy manors looked the other way.  
   
The atmosphere wasn't sewed of that velvet silence that piles up on the mantelpieces of the wealthiest houses. It is a truth most rarely acknowledged, but quietness is not something that is universally affordable, it is not – and it may appear to some oversimple to think in such a way – something you earn because you've deserved it. You were not born quietly either. You can build your own quietness, but this should be no surprise if something or somebody ultimately comes and shatters it with your whole tea set, or maybe a few, well-chosen words. The thing about quietness, is that it is almost always hoarded on someone else's noise.  
   
So the semi-houses surroundings were noisy. But, typically enough, they managed to be noisy in a non-affirmative way. There was no definite sound, only a vague background of whispers and metallic clinking, uneasy laughs and unidentified screeching. It felt like this house never breathed. Like it had rolled down the hills, all the way to the beach, like a stone, heavy and ballasted with lead.  
   
We are used to thinking that provisional housing verges on homelessness because it feels like sleeping in the open, but it's not. It is very different from that, even if it indeed negates the concept of home. It is too closed upon itself. Home needs air. Windows that open on nature and to the world, to the unknown. But this house could never be breached. It was sinking. From a certain perspective, say, from a watch point, a tower, this kind of house looked like garbage that had been washed up by some unfortunate riptide.  
   
There were survivors, though. They'd barely noticed the sound at first, it mingled so naturally with the others, and when they did, it was almost too late to hide, which says a lot considering who it was that wanted a hiding and what kind of youth they both had. Youth, in a way, is very much like housing. And then come tide and time for each and every one.  
   
They glided into the shadow of an oblique wall when the small form made itself noticeable, way after the normal time for a person to become so. The child looked like he couldn't have seen them anyway. He wasn't looking their way; he wasn't looking at anything really, for his eyes barely opened. His body was otherwise occupied. From afar, he might have given the impression that he was dancing a weird dance, that once fleetingly popular dance you learned when you were little and knew by heart but would be incapable of performing by now, for reasons of decency and forgetfulness combined; but that was something else entirely. His shoulders were opening and closing like fragile wings, his head dodged forward, his back bent at irregular angles, and the delirious energy that surged from his erratic fits of coughing seemed to be the only thing that propelled him onward. For a moment, it stopped. This is when they heard the dog.  
   
It took the paleness of his master, the hollowness of his eyes, to hear it as it truly was, but animals always had their own special way of being unhealthy. So it didn't cough exactly. It gargled like a dying old fountain. As they came near the house, the dog sniffed under a pile of old planks and came out with a tin can on its nose. Seeing him quite stuck with his new possession, the child laughed like gravel, took off the can and reached in his pocket to find an old plastic bone he offered in exchange. This was obviously customary, and the dog reluctantly abandoned his discovery to chew on the bone with resignation. The tatty plastic was reddish, which struck the girl as odd. She was so close she could read the faded “DDS” initials that used to be printed on it.  
A voice suddenly came out of the wall, and the child coughed forwards quickly, shut the nonexisting door, and became unheard.  
   
The girl didn't wait for the woman to signal that everything was clear (not that they were in the habit of signaling that exactly, the idea being utterly preposterous). She stepped out, ignored the woman's hands and walked until she could get a clear picture of the house. She then proceeded to look at it. She looked at it long and hard. And when she was done, she took off her beret, searched its lining, and through a convenient hole got hold of a small parcel of green powder that she placed inside the abandoned can. On second thought, she searched the beret again, produced a pencil and a piece of paper. She scribbled something on it, stuck it around the can, and strode away without looking back. She walked from the cliff into the unknown, in a straight line, faster and faster. The woman would never admit it, but she had to run to catch up with her. When she did, the girl still wouldn't look at her. She was starring into the void, panting, blazing with rage. The woman grabbed her elbow, and she turned around so fast she almost spun. Not caring about witnesses, not caring about those dark, anonymous figures on the island, not caring about lighthouses and towers, she yelled at the top of her lungs:  
   
“For God's sake, what the hell is wrong here?”  
   
The woman gave her a loaded, blank look.  
   
“Nothing. Figure it out. Nothing had ever been wrong in Stain'd-by-the-Sea.”  
   
The girl's face contorted in despair, and she squeezed the woman's hand, long and hard. She looked her in the eyes, and her eyes were full of pity, the pity you reserve for the greatest occasions and sins, for those who are so deprived they almost seem – but almost, but the monstrosity – to belong to another specie entirely, and she said:  
   
“I am so sorry for your loss.”  
   
   
   
   
   
   
  
   
  
   
There was a girl, and there was a woman, and there was a dark, dark place but maybe, just maybe, it was the other way around.  
   
[…]


	3. ______________ | Interlude

It is said never to answer the questions strangers ask.


	4. The last few children who remembered vaguely that a house was here took trains

It was becoming hard for the girl to hold up the corners of her dress. The weeds were so heavy now. She could feel the texture dampening around her knees, but the night was so tepid it eventually resulted in an odd mix of temperatures, that insipid impression you get when entering a public swimming-pool. Fresh water, she had to remind herself, not the real thing, only fresh water. Still, even the weight seemed unusual. But almost everything was.  
   
A gloved hand throw with disgust one more red cluster in the provisional soft basket without really acknowledging her. She was keeping her distance, as if the girl was a walking sense of doom.  
   
“Don't you think this is quite enough?”  
   
The woman picked up another weed.  
   
“With those, you'll soon discover you never have enough. If we want this to work, we have to be careful, or they will catch us at it, and then… have you heard of their police force?”  
   
The girl hadn't, but she thought it better not to ask. Swaying under her burden, she only said:  
   
“I am not sure I can hold it much longer. This is heavier than it should be.”  
   
“Yes, it is. You would think they would take a hint, wouldn't you?… we should walk a little more, we are still too close.”  
   
“How can you tell? All I can see is darkness. Sometimes I am not even sure if my eyes are opened.”  
   
If there had been any possibility of doing so, the woman would have given her a sympathetic look. But she let her struggle with her dress and walked on like a pitching ship. A shadow of the icy sweat had remained in the crook of her neck since the monstrosity arrived. This one really was blowing hot and cold.  
   
And all the girl could think, regardless of her current predicament, was that it was late, so late. She should have known. But now was not a time for clocks. Admittedly, in here, even space seemed curved around a particular idea. They had drawn a circle around Stain'd-by-the-Sea that reverberated like rings on water. Something must have felt the vibrations, something had kept an ear to the ground, and an eye… something had kept an eye. She had known it. And she wondered.  
   
So what choice did she have now but following the woman in what could very well be a trap – it was so obviously a trap that she suspected it might really be one – and holding on to the hems of the damp fabric.  
   
“This feels wrong.”  
   
Silence answered. And suddenly, in a beat, the woman's voice was in her ear, unexpected and hushed.  
   
“This is Stain'd. This is what we do here. Anytime, any day. You should see the figures. I have. I like to see what becomes of my inheritance, unlike some others...”  
   
She heard her take a breath and go on:  
   
“Stop. That place is ideal.”  
   
The girl tried to look around but there was nothing now but the woman's voice and the woman's breath, and the woman's unbreakable will to have her do something so blatantly dreadful it might actually be so, if the level of the game was what she thought it was.  
   
“I'll draw lines in the sand. Follow and fill them up, neatly. I have a feeling you will be perfect at that.”  
   
She didn't like the sound of the voice now, but she had learned not to rely on this. The invisible feet left a long, grating sound along the beach.  
   
“They will see it too.”  
   
“By then it will be too late and I'll be gone too. Or maybe not. I still haven't decided on that.”  
   
The girl bent and unloaded her first weed. It was reluctant to go, and wrapped around her wrist like a blistered tentacle. She scratched it with her nails immediately, feeling a bit sick.  
   
“Is that about the bluebird? Because it really shouldn't mean so much.”  
   
   
She could have slapped herself then, but she had no mean to know. An educated guess would have been achievable, but it would have implied that she trusted the fragmentary stories she had heard, and the fact that she did not was the very reason of her being there at all.

  
   
]...[  
 

  
It was dark enough that she hadn't been able to read her face completely when the bluebird appeared, but the atmosphere had changed so violently that the wave of fear overwhelmed her as well before she knew anything was happening. In the flipping of a wing, the woman was gone. She crumpled on herself like a piece of paper, and their moment shattered. The girl thought she almost cried. The night tore. The woman let go. The bird that had come to her landed on their quietness.  
   
And on her beret, but that was besides the point. V. had trained it to do so in one of his fits of practical joking, and now she was condemned to ridicule every time something was turning for the worst, which was so fitting it made her swallow her bitterness. The poor thing looked exhausted and rumpled, and very much conscious of finding itself in the most hostile environment that could ever be, so she took it in her hands to fill the void and cupped it, to make herself believe there was at least one thing she could shield from the world and keep warm.  
   
The bird gave a small cough and handed her its foot piteously. She didn't notice the woman rubbing her own hand hard to the leather jacket.  
   
“Make it go.”  
   
She sounded as rational as it went, but the girl could hear her heavy breath.  
“What happened to your crows? At least they remained tolerable by looking stuffed.”  
   
“This one is mine. What happens here is personal. We name them after people who worries us, you know”, she added as it it were a manner of apology. The woman just looked away.  
   
“The crows are not so reliable these days”, the girl said in a small voice. “Sometimes they just whispers threats to your ear instead of the fundamentals of fridge code and E.A.'s poetry like they're supposed to.”  
   
The woman probably wouldn't have been derisive in other circumstances, but she was momentarily out of her.  
   
“Well I'm sorry you and your little friends had to go freelance, but this… this is not something we tolerate here. At least not me. So send it away now, and maybe I won't change my mind about all this.”  
   
The girl avoided her gaze, taking advantage of the dark in a cowardly fashion, and unrolled the parchment she had untied from the bird. She was late. She knew she was, but surely…  
   
“It would seem, she said in a blank voice after reading the code, that I am without a ride.”  
   
She was stranded here. The woman was right, this was more than a meddle, the town was a net made of stones and glue, and as soon as you had set foot on the murky sand, you were trapped forever. No way home. To be fair, she had lost her home, or at least her access to it, a long time ago, but this was somehow worse. It was night, it was dark, and it felt cool now, cool and damp, and she was all alone with a woman she didn't really know, a woman made of an intricate fabric of stories and lies who was scared out of her wits by the sight of a single bird. A woman who had, possibly, probably pushed her partner from a cliff. She was going to die here.  
   
“I must go.”  
   
She was now the one to sound panicked, to sound mad.  
   
“But didn't you just say...”  
   
“I'll take the train.”  
   
The woman's answer was sharp, immediate, and resolute. It sounded like the most obvious and reasonable thing that was said that night.  
   
“No.”  
   
“Some run at night. That's how I came in.”  
   
She could hear steps coming her way. There was urgency in the woman's voice.  
   
“Coming in is different. Anyway that's not how you came in. You did the most ridiculous thing. You walked. I confess I have no idea what it says about you as a heroin. Not much, I'm afraid.”  
   
The girl said nothing, because truth was, K. had positively refused to come nearer than 10 miles to the town. She couldn't blame her. Her family had always had a painfully good memory.  
   
“You have been watching me”, she temporized.  
“I'm afraid you are not as discrete as you'd like to think. Which is why. Listen to me. You will not take that train. Not now. Not ever.”  
   
The girl briskly took a step back and looked around in panic, only to meet more darkness.  
   
“Why? What have you done to my driver? I have nothing that you want, you know that!”  
   
She felt someone grab her arm, and another hand sliding into hers. The hold was firm and she had to stop her retreat, finding herself entangled with the woman, who whispered fast in her ear:  
   
“Will you calm down, I didn't do a thing, no listen, I said listen. You will not take that train. I know what kind of trains those are. Those trains only come at night, and they only go one way. There are, consequently, almost empty, except for the right people. Inside, the lights are dim, warm, low. They draw straight blue lines in the dark and they don't let out a whistle. They reel and fume so much. It is late. You are young. I will not have you take a train tonight. Think what you may about my encounter with your friend, I still haven't decided what my responsibility may be, but I will at least try to balance the odds by keeping you safe. I know where those trains go. I know where they come from. I know what drive them. Their wheels keep turning. They never stop. At least certainly not when and where you want them to. What do you think? They are  
waiting for you. Of that I have no doubt, even though they do are most discrete than you. Who do you think works the engine? Who nourishes the furnace?”  
   
The girl didn't answered because she felt she was too foolish to be entitled to speak. She had been so careless. Since the beginning, she had been driven by her will to get the statue back and to test the waters, to see if the woman really will keep it protected. And in truth she had been chasing a story. She might not have progressed very much on any of the preceding points, but somewhere alone the line, going home in the middle of the night and staying alive had outmatched everything in a fit of blurred fear. She had been ill-prepared. Her instructors would be ashamed if they saw her, for the few of them who were still alive. Now she had literally thrown herself into the arms of – the enemy, perhaps, but possibly not – and others were just waiting for her to leave town to close the net. She didn't even know which others. And K. … if J. really was in trouble, which was what she understood from the code, he would have sent for M., logically. It was, in every way, unexpected. K. knew that of course, otherwise she wouldn't have written “shocking reports of my brother”. Still, was there any truth in…  
   
“How do I know you don't intend to prevent me from taking that train because… there's something to it that you don't want me to discover?”  
   
The woman's grip strengthened.  
   
“Absolutely, there is something to it that I don't want you to discover, you're right. It is almost as if you had been listening to anything I've been telling you lately. Oh please, Nancy Drew. Because of course there is some wonderful and perfect item hidden somewhere that will help you solve everything, and now that I have banned it, it is for certain inside that train. That's how life had felt to you recently?”  
   
Now the girl really felt stupid. Somehow, if she couldn't trust the woman with the notion that that train was dangerous, she wouldn't trust anything and anyone anymore. There was only was certitude that night, one truth. Those were rare enough. She'd better hold to it. With a little bit of luck, and given the levels of intricacy, she had a chance of making it out by having no end game, which sounded exotic enough to reshuffle the cards, and calculated enough that she would follow her only real interests. She did have read too many books. Which is also why she suddenly grew aware of the arms that were encircling her at an odd angle.  
   
“Look”, said the woman in her ear, as if to no one in particular, “here is what we are going to do. First and foremost, you send that dreadful thing away before I skin it into earmuffs, and maybe, along the way, you can use it to signal to your accomplice who had been locking the sky down ever since you arrived. Even if it proves unsurprisingly worthless, we will still need to make ourselves visible. I can't even see your face, I certainly wouldn't fly something tonight.”  
   
The girl looked stunned, but it was hard to say if she was pretending or not.  
  
   
“My… But I told her to stay away. She swore, she ended up swearing, this was so dangerous, if anyone saw her, and there's a lighthouse...”  
   
The woman sighed.  
   
“Presumably, this is a tower of woe, but we are safe on that side. Right now you are in far more immediate danger than that plane person, and after you're rescued, well, I guess it will be moot.”  
   
The girl felt a wave of despair raising above her. This indeed was personal, and she wanted the fewest persons possible involved. K. was one thing; she stood in the margins and had a history of her own with the place. She was known, she was already part of it, she was playing the awful game of hide and sink because her brother had been and then she had had no choice at all. And still she stayed in the background. H. had been there already, for business apparently, and it seemed that he knew some of the Clinic's staff. She had gathered from him that the place was as quiet as it went in this wretched town, that is, not so much, but quiet enough, even if by accident most of the time. So H. was watching, but not over her, and that was just as well, because there she was hurryupping into mayhem and cracks and bangs.  
   
But House Anwhistle had managed to avoid attracting too much attention on itself in the past years. They weren't the Snickets, or, she thought bitterly, some others. Through bold moves and confidence, by some strike of luck, they had escaped the worst of the hurricane, for now. J. was too good to her, but she might not have realized that she could make herself noticeable by flying in circle above the missing sea like a bird without a prey.  
   
On second thoughts, or so it seemed, the woman added:  
   
“You cannot stay here either. I can't hide you forever, and I'm pretty sure you'll eat all my bread.”  
   
For the briefest moment, a possibility flickered. The girl tried to face her, her neck stretched out, and smiled an awkward smile.  
   
“I bake, you know. This is almost everything I can say when it comes to being good company, but it is more than almost everyone else we know can. Add to that I don't play the accordion.”  
   
“Barrack B67 it is for you, then. Shy, short-tempered, self-righteous pretty thing with no musical skills whatsoever but a passing singing voice and large repertoire. If you are Gemini, that is fine,  
too. The scones are a bonus. God, of all the talent show kids they raise up in a vacuum, why did I get the baker?”  
   
“If this is of any consolation to you, said the girl with the air of trying a little too much, this is not my primary aptitude.”  
   
The woman managed to get a playful expression, something quite difficult to achieve for one maintaining a solid arm-lock on someone short.  
   
“By all means, do not tell. I need some dizzying enigma to occupy my long nights of unemployment. I'll grant myself three guesses.”  
   
The girl blinked, like someone who had trouble concentrating and just hopscotched her way into the conversation.  
   
“How in Blyton do you know anything of my singing voice?”  
   
Her face discomposed as she finished. The woman answered anyway, probably because there are some triumphs that must be formulated to really count.  
   
“Ten miles is quite a long walk, now, isn't it? I particularly enjoyed the one on the firewatcher's girl. Rang a few bells. Wish I could understand half of the others.”  
   
“This is traditional.”  
   
It was true to a certain extend, like most things. The Vivacious Dawn Choir had had an extensive, if a bit obsessional, repertoire.  
   
“I'm sure. And you could as well have walked into town with a “Take Me Down” sign attached to your beret. I beg you to do a better job of staying alive. Please. This is becoming embarrassing for the both of us.”  
   
The girl had the good grace to blush slightly, and it got lost through the thickness of the night, like most things. She thought that, really, they could have used an instructor like the woman at the Academy, for there was a time for Very Difficult Crosswords solving – and that time wasn't “eight  
o'clock, Monday morning, weekly” – and a time for being taught actual survival reflexes in the context of a multi-sided war. They never adjusted the curriculum. They probably thought it would have added dissension to dissension. How can you be expected to share a cup of tea with a fifty years old entomologist whose formation essentially consisted in Amusing Oddities of Latin Grammar and Experimental Archeology Escapism when you spent your early years studying Cells and Other Locked Rooms Escape and Mass Psychology: How to Make Yourself Believable in the Face of Authority? For him, a cup of tea is the polite way to signal he needs help hiding his latest fascinating discovery, the mute cricket, when to you it is the polite way to ask for some wasp antidote you will, if refused, steal anyway. Surely it was bound to create turmoil over the sugar bowl. So they never upgraded. They grew old without any of them making it to old age. They could have been trained to survive, but they remained the odd archeologists. And they never made themselves believable in the face of Authority. It enraged her sometimes.

  
   
“So, at the end of the day, how do you make a quiet place to land?”


	5. The Architect

[…]  
   
   
“That beast of yours does not rule my life, no. Let's hope it knows its business. I don't see why I, too, can't have friends in high places.”  
   
The girl was aligning some weeds to follow a tricky curve, and she frowned to the sand. It was not like she hadn't a card or two to play, but she suspected the woman was just messing with her for sheer pleasure.  
   
“They fly alright, remember. On eagles. I don't suppose you will like that very much either.”  
   
“Oh, I'm not sure those ones do. Not sure at all.”  
   
The girl paused and turned to her, a long alga still waiting to be disposed of in her hand.  
   
“But...but you… This makes no sense!”  
   
“I guess you are right, for once. With those ones, I suppose I have too many artistic differences. Them, I would push. Them I am against, and this is my side.”  
   
“This is not a side. There also are...”  
   
“I know what there is. But I am final about this. This is how I see things, and it's not your way, fine, but you must have understood by now that it is naive to think you can influence me otherwise. I trust no one, because not one can be trusted. What I do is keep my balance and fight them. I know I am just a piece of your game, but guess what, you are one of mine.”  
   
The girl muttered something that sounded like “not a piece in my game” while compressing a long corridor of weeds into a sharp angle. Now she looked like she had dried blood under her fingernails. She could still hear her heart beating in her ears, despite – and if you looked at it with a very kind and weirdly educated eye, maybe that's what it was, after all – the woman's attempts to  
distract her. She considered herself distracted, but the fear was still there, creeping slowly under the folds of her mind and a thick blanket of red weeds. She hoped the stains on her hands would go eventually. She would have to wash them as soon as she got out.  
   
They worked for some time in silence. The air felt heavier now that all light had disappeared and all noise had been muffled, as if the night was papered with empty egg cartons, and your cries remained stuck in your throat. The only sound was the feeble grating of the woman's shoes on the sand, and the splashing of algae falling one by one into place. It still felt very wrong. But the girl also felt like she had no sort of choice: the woman had drawn the lines for her to follow, and follow it she must. She found herself drawn to the furrow that she was sowing with the evilest sprout, one after another, in a double act of perverted gardening, for from this bed would probably spring the deadliest flowers the absent beach had ever seen. She thought about her old self, the one who came to this town to pursue a statue and an old longing, a thirst for fiction, who had passed the gates singing. She had no predefined idea of what this encounter was to be like, but she had thought of a clearer alternative: a dark, elusive figure who would have hurt her or tried; or… what exactly? What was the brighter, good version of that mythical creature? Wasn't it a bit unfair that the myriad of stories that floated around her were only variations of a dark legend? At best, she realized, she expected someone she could have bribed. She raised her eyes towards the dark form that was completing her drawing in the sand with the tip of her foot, in one last, graceful sweep. There was not a single way she could have seen anything, read anything in her. It was just as well. But the woman's weird logic was growing on her. She probably wasn't unreadable in the end, you only had to listen. To her own misfortune, she had developed a way of thinking so personal, so detached from the organization's considerations, that she had appeared mysterious and unreliable to those who had had the right and space to tell the story. Maybe there was no slippery woman after all. Maybe there was just a woman one could not control. Maybe there was someone who didn't fit inside a pre-designed plot, a supernumerary piece. Maybe she was currently being tricked and would never see the next morning. But she wanted to believe and, following this line of thought, while assembling red weeds into a peculiar shape at an ungodly hour on an empty beach in a hostile town, maybe she forged her own key to this particular lock. And where there is a forge, there comes fire.  
   
When she finished, her back ached. The woman had watched her last efforts with attention, sat on their coats and smoking her third cigarette. The girl wouldn't have dreamed of voicing it, but the small source of light was actually kind of reassuring. Dark was endless. The night was endless. This blank, neutral feeling was endless, and she was gathering washed-up garbage for what seemed eternity, so it was good to think that, in a few minutes or so, this one cigarette would come to an end and meet with the friable ground under the woman's boot.  
   
She stood up and tried to brush away the sticky sand that had left round marks on her knees and flakes in her hair. There still was a long red trace on her wrist where the first alga had grasped, and it looked cut. She didn't see much, but by the only light she had, she discerned neat snakes carefully assembled, and her unease grew.  
   
“What now?” she asked the woman.  
   
She breathed out a cloud of smoke and said:  
   
“Now we hope your friend is swift and smart and can give you an actual lift. I want you out of my hands, so that I can think for real. Now we prepare our handkerchiefs, before gravity do us part. Now, you might want to take a step backwards.”  
   
As the girl wasn't reacting, she caught her hand and dragged her against her, oblivious to the fact that those very hands were now soiled with a sinister imprint. The girl only starred. She had no idea, she kept repeating herself. No idea.  
   
“What if is all a mistake?” she asked.  
   
The woman raised her eyebrows.  
   
“From time to time you need something definite, don't you think? It's sane.”  
   
And there was that light in her eyes.  
   
Now, there was no reason to wait. No reason to leave anything hanging between them. Which is why the girl said, in a voice that was almost apologetic:  
   
“I've always be drawn to water.”  
   
The woman picked something in her hair, which made her start. She whispered:  
   
“Well, isn't someone delusional?”  
She wanted to ask again about the statue, she really did. Even if she doubted any of Them would ever do what she did that night, exactly what she did. The woman could not completely hate her now, no, she hoped she couldn't.  
   
“Does it ever rain?”, she asked, because ideas sometimes take the odd road.  
   
“You tell me. This sand must be damp from something. But I think it waits for its secret hour. Nobody has seen a single drop fall in years.”  
   
The girl looked at the sky, or maybe at the ground, there was no way to tell.  
   
“I think that if I were to stay a little longer, it would.”  
   
The woman looked away and smiled, but her eyes remained cast, as if she didn't dare.  
   
“No one expects you to carry all this weight. And besides… you're not from here.”  
   
“I know.”  
   
“We paved that road, we knew where it was headed. I've always liked to think they knew.”  
   
She looked at her in a way that could have meant anything.  
   
“Don't be so sweet. And don't be so scared. The end is near.”  
   
She pushed the girl back gently behind her.  
   
“If your colleague is efficient, we will only wait a few minutes. Be ready to go.”  
   
There was a pregnant pause during which the woman inhaled the smoke from her cigarette as if it was the very last time. She cast a playful glance to the girl over her shoulder.  
   
“They keep harvesting it, but no one ever asked me what I would do with all these weeds.”  
   
The girl leaned against the woman to protect herself from an invisible threat. This was not the time to refuse humoring her.  
   
“And what is it?”  
   
The woman took the cigarette from her mouth and smiled into it.  
   
“Fireworks.”  
 


	6. The night has a thousand eyes

She saw the moment the red spot made a straight line to the ground. She remembered noting the glow illuminated the piles of weeds for the briefest moment. She remembered glimpsing at a shape that looked rather familiar and sent a stone directly into her stomach. She remembered catching her breath. She saw the red spot disappearing inside a cluster. And then she didn't see anything.  
   
Whiteness washed off her darkened pupils like silver lightening, and there wasn't any blue filter nor thick darkness anymore. There wasn't anything anymore. She was deep into a pool of wadding. Then she blinked. And then it was Hell.  
   
Reds and oranges raised vertically and exploded into sick flowers. A wind of mercilessness had gushed upon them. Downwards, flickers of emerald and purple came and went like electric eels. Walls were built in an instant, a liquid fortress, circles within circles. At first it stood very still. And then, it bent, like it was going to close upon them and trap them forever inside a living furnace. But it shifted, beautiful and appeasing, before growing high again, and a tide was set.  
   
Then there was the smell. Powder. Matches. Something that had always been there, underlying, familiar and within reach, and it seemed that the beach finally released a breath it had been holding for some time, with ease, with relief. A sudden splash of hotness flooded everything. As the flames receded, lines became visible, curves, and angles. A design unveiled itself, and laid bare in plain sight. Everything roared and cracked around them, but they couldn't hear a sound. They were in the eye of the hurricane. And an eye opened across the night, spelling its name in fiery letters.

  
   
The girl felt her face being caught between hands, and suddenly there was the woman's face in front of her, flushed, hair floating in the warm air, and her eyes frantic, black, inky, so that it was the first image that imprinted on the girl's blank retina. There was urgency in her voice.  
   
“Listen to me. We don't have much time. Now I speak. Now you see me under a different light.”  
   
The girl didn't blink.  
   
“I sometimes share your moral relativism, but what you did tonight was right, I believe. Yes, right. And it's been so long since anyone did something right. I trust myself, because there is no one else to trust, but it made me wonder when was the last time I acted, really acted, unambiguously. You can't always have it both ways. Sometimes you need something definite, something sane.”  
   
The girl realized her hands weren't gloved anymore.  
   
“So have it. Not that it will allow you to control everything. And I will chase them, too. I will crush them the way they deserve.”  
   
Never looking away, the girl asked:  
   
“How will you extinguish it?”  
   
The woman smiled a real smile.  
   
“I know how to start them, and I know how to put them out. Fascinating, isn't it?”  
   
“But you drew...”  
   
“I did, didn't I? I thought it was a nice touch. I can picture both sides and extras frowning over it until the end of time. And if it is the police who finds it, well… That will be a nice reminder of lost things and Christmas past.”  
   
Fire cracked, and something was glided in her hand.  
   
“They are right about you, you know”, the girl said.  
   
Black eyes squinted.  
   
“Are they now?”  
   
“Yes. You are full of wonders.”  
   
The woman sighed.  
   
“Don't play with words, please. I am so old.”  
   
“That is not true.”  
   
“Trust me. I am so very old.”  
   
The girl tilted her head.  
   
“No mystery, though. No mystery at all.”  
   
She examined that face carefully, feeling her time was almost up.  
   
“There is only you.”  
   
Relief spread on the woman's features, and you could tell they were out of practice. She gave her a look. And to her it meant everything.  
   
 

  
   
Fleeting joy is one of those remarkable feelings that aren't tainted by the sound of a plane's propellers approaching.  
   
“So, this is goodbye, then?” asked the girl.  
   
“No”, said the woman while handing her her coat and beret. “You must hope with all your heart that, for your own good, this is adieu.”  
   
They could see the plane descending quickly. She could only imagine what J. must be thinking right now. When it was low enough, a rope ladder fell down from the sky and hang up swinging back and forth, either from the initial impact or the waves of heat. The girl grabbed it and pulled at it a certain number of times, according to the usual code. The ladder raised in answer the right way, which won her an appreciative look from the woman. While the girl had reached for her  
coat, she wasn't letting go yet.  
   
“Any parting words?” she asked.  
   
“I don't know”, said the girl. “Maybe: “you know, you are entitled to rage against the dying of that light?”  
   
The woman nodded silently.  
   
“And you?”  
   
She gave her another look, a different one, as if she considered the matter very seriously.

  
   
““What did you say your name was again?””  
   
The girl smiled to her, and climbed the ladder.


	7. Coda

  
When she reached the cockpit, she was confronted with a rather disgruntled aviator.  
   
“Jiminy Cricket, what happened down there?”  
   
J. pilot glasses were on, but from the state of her hair you could tell that she had been worrying.  
   
“And what kind of a signal was that? Are you out of your mind? I thought for a tick the enemy abducted you. That giant eye scared the hell out of me.”  
   
“You're never scared of anything, Josephine”, the girl said quietly.  
   
She had seated next to J. and was looking down at the beach by the window as they gained altitude. The beach looked back at her. The flames cut a neat scar in the night, but after some time, it seemed to decrease. It blinked. And then it was like some giant eyelid had shut upon it, leaving only darkness behind. She wasn't sure, it may have been the clouds. She turned to her pilot:  
   
“Thanks for picking me up. It seems that I was in a sorry plight, but not the expected one.”  
   
J. tsked disapprovingly.  
   
“What's up with Kit anyway? It was very irresponsible of her to stand you up. And I wouldn't trust H. with anything. I'm glad I didn't listen to you and keep an eye on that dreadful town.”  
   
“As it happens, I would take the twisted way back, if I were you. I've heard that summer is over and done.”  
   
J. slammed a hand over the mahogany control board.  
   
“What! I didn't think it was that close a call, or I would have gotten in contact way earlier! Of all the inconsiderate, nonsensical things to do, when you were living a quiet life...”  
  
   
“Careful, you know your trajectory tends to wobble when you are upset.”  
   
The cabin was trembling in an ominous way, which had always the girl anguished instantly, but J. remained undisturbed.  
   
“I am not upset… It's just that I thought you were done. You said as much yourself. And now this...”  
   
“You don't know where this will end, Josephine.”  
   
“Well, neither do you, young lady, and there you are, lightening fires!”  
   
The turbulence was stronger this time. The girl grabbed a leather armrest and closed her eyes. She remembered now that she was afraid of flying.  
   
“It...wasn't me. Not really.”  
   
J. gave a violent stroke of control stick, and the plane did somersaults. She didn't even flinch.  
   
“I rather hope you're not trying to sell me a double personality kind of act, because I have you know that this had been tried before in our history, and, I'm ashamed to say, more than once, although arguably one case was debatable...”  
   
“That wasn't my intention.”  
   
She sighed and fidgeted with the brass buttons of the radio, looking for a familiar tune or maybe an echo. The engine had come back to a regular purring that helped her calm down.  
   
“How was the Amazon forest?” she asked pensively.  
   
“Terrific, as always. Wet. Wonderful fossils. Don't try changing the subject. How was V.?”  
  
   
“Asleep. Apparently, I could have dispensed from the maintenance outfit, these people seem alright, H. was on point. I didn't see anyone too closely, though. It was as if they knew who I was, and decided to play along. I left him some of the medicine. It will take time but he's recovering slowly, we shouldn't worry”, she said, mainly to convince herself.  
   
She was opening her mouth to add something, but some notes on the radio caught her ear, and she held on. Just then, the phone rang.  
   
J. frowned and answered. They didn't use it much, but at some point she had decided that, if H. had been able to work out a way to receive calls in altitude, she was bloody going to have it installed too.  
   
“I didn't realize this was a sad occasion. Who by what? Who shall I say is calling?… Alright, hang on.”  
   
She turned to the girl with a dissatisfied look and gave her the receiver.  
   
“It's for you.”  
   
The girl felt her breath tremble when she said:  
   
“Hello?”  
   
“I suggest you check your coat's lining someday. You never now when you will want to part ways with someone. As for the missing ones… well, if you keep looking for them and if I keep hiding them, I think that you will see more of me, eventually.”  
   
The girl smiled into the phone and didn't say anything. She got her coat and felt the edge: something hard and irregular was stuck in it, something that did not seem so different from the other package she had gotten back earlier that night.  
   
The voice was full of parasites, the sound terrible, but nonetheless. She should have been terrified. She wasn't.  
   
“Oh and, hello to you too. I don't know if you wished to stay on your parting words or if the line is dead, you never know with modern tech. I suppose I'll use my imagination.”  
   
The girl probably wasn't too serene about that last part, for, before altitude or H.'s engineering limits cut the link, she took a deep breath and asked:

  
   
“Is the music coming from my side or from yours?”  
   
   
––


End file.
